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Flight in the Jovian Stratosphere. Engine Concept and Flight Altitude

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Flight in the Jovian Stratosphere. Engine Concept and Flight Altitude Flight in the Jovian Stratosphere – Engine Concept and Flight Altitude Determination Nedislav S. Veselinov,1 Martin N. Karanikolov, 1 Vladislav V. Shihskin1, Dimitar M. Mladenov2 Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria An effective method for detailed observation of the Solar System planets is the use of vehicles that can perform flight in their atmospheres, with the most promising of them being Flyers (aircraft for other planets atmospheres). Besides the advantage of probing the atmosphere directly, they have the ability to fly on selected direction and altitude, making them suitable for collecting information over large areas. Equipping the Flyer with nuclear propulsion will allow it to conduct flight for months without the need of combustible fuel or oxidizer to be carried on board. Among the planets of the Solar System and their satellites, Jupiter is a viable target for exploration, since it features thick atmosphere suitable for aerodynamic flight, there is no solid surface that can be contaminated after end of the mission, and the atmospheric data for designing a Flyer is readily available. This paper proposes a mathematical model for evaluating the thrust, the lift and the maximum allowable mass for horizontal steady flight as functions of the altitude and different heat chamber temperatures. I. Introduction F ROM the beginning of the space era, over thirty probes have been sent into the atmosphere or landed on the surface of the other planets in the Solar System. However, most of them lacked the capability for sustained flight. The only vehicles that successfully reached and conducted continuous flight in the atmosphere of a planet other than the Earth were the Vega-1 and Vega-2 balloons in 1985. They flew over twenty thousand kilometers into the atmosphere of Venus and collected valuable scientific information [1, 2]. NASA’s Perseverance rover or the planned Dragonfly mission [3] will utilize rotary aircraft. However, these will rely on electric motors and will have very limited range and speed. 1 PhD Student, Faculty of Physics, Department of Radio Physics and Electronics. 2 Dr., Associated professor, Faculty of Physics, Department of Theoretical Physics. Among remote observation, satellites remain the most widespread mean of exploring extraterrestrial atmospheres. However, the satellites fly high above the dense atmosphere. The most efficient way to probe and assess important physical parameters like pressure and temperature distribution, and altitude gradients, is to perform flight through different layers of the atmosphere. This can be achieved by flying the satellite into the thick lower layers towards the end of its mission or by designing an atmospheric entry spacecraft to collect data during its descent. Two notable examples for such spacecraft are the ESA’s Huygens lander on Titan and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which uploaded valuable atmospheric data from Jupiter for almost an hour during its descent [4,5]. Continuous, powered flight can be conducted by a Flyer that relies on classical airplane principles. To produce sufficient lift, relatively dense atmosphere and / or high airspeed are required. The engine will need to produce enough thrust to enable high-speed flight. The flight duration will obviously be limited to the amount of propellant carried on board or the mission will need to rely on external energy source, like solar power. However, the usage of electric engines supplied by solar panels is meaningful only near bodies close to the Sun. For instance, the energy reaching the Jovian atmosphere consists of about 5% of the solar irradiation intensity at Earth’s orbit [6]. Furthermore, only fraction of the solar energy reaches the lower layers, due to atmospheric scattering and other effects. For this reason, electric propulsion relying on solar panels is an unfeasible choice for high-speed flight on bodies with dense atmosphere or beyond the orbit of Mars. An alternative approach would be to utilize nuclear heat to produce thrust. The nuclear fuel has extremely high energy density that allows for months, if not years, of sustainable flight before the fuel is depleted. Unlike chemical combustion, the nuclear reaction does not rely on oxygen to produce heat. This enables flight in anaerobic atmospheres and without the need of carrying oxidizer. The engine can be designed as a ramjet, which relies on supersonic gas compression instead of turbo compressor to produce thrust, which has a number of advantages: it has few moving parts, which minimizes the risk of mechanical failure, and it is light. The latter is of paramount importance, given the capabilities of the launch vehicles and the cost to deliver every kilogram into orbit of other planets3. Such design is called Nuclear-Powered Ramjet Engine (NPRE). A nuclear heat engine has been tested on Earth within the US Military Project Pluto and has shown very promising results. The engine achieved 156,000 N thrust during tests [7]. The project envisaged the creation of the SLAM 3 The mission cost of the Galileo mission was $1,5 billion [8,9]. Given the mass of the atmospheric probe and the satellite of about 3.000 kg, means that the per kg mission cost was approx. $500.000 (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile) nuclear-powered supersonic missile, capable of performing long-duration flight on complex trajectories. The project was closed in 1964, because the military favored the intercontinental ballistic missile approach. However, the results show that the technical challenges are manageable and NPRE is a viable flight propulsion option. Research on nuclear-powered planetary flight was conducted in Ref [8]. The work suggests that a flight could be performed with a 3-tonne Flyer at subsonic speed. The proposed Flyer featured an engine with a turbo compressor, nuclear heat chamber and a turbine. It relied on a classical turbo-jet principle to produce thrust but relied on a nuclear heat chamber instead of chemical combustion. Considering the gas composition of Jupiter, a very high rotational speed and multiple compressor stages will be required to achieve sufficient compression. Such compressor will need to withstand higher mechanical loads and will have higher mass, compared to a turbo machine for similar conditions on Earth. This will increase the total mission mass, cost and the risk of mechanical failure. For these reasons, ramjet engines relying on supersonic compression are more practical compared to subsonic turbo designs, especially for flight in hydrogen-rich atmospheres with high local speed of sound. Another in-depth research on nuclear-powered flight was conducted in Ref. [9, 10]. In this research, an atmospheric variation of MITEE (MIniature reacTor EnignE) nuclear rocket engine was proposed. Some physical and geometric parameters of the engine were calculated, without conducting detailed design or evaluating possible flight altitudes. The proposed design features small payload and very high engine temperatures (1500 K) which would require a cooling solution and very powerful reactor. A NPRE-based Flyer has its technical limitations. It requires dense atmosphere for sufficient thrust and lift to be generated. This makes the concept unsuitable for flight on Mars, for instance. In case of rocky bodies with dense atmospheres like Venus and Titan, there is the moral obstacle of using nuclear power for aerodynamic flight, since the Flyer will ultimately crash into the surface and contaminate to local ecosystem with radioactive material. These considerations make gas giants a viable option for such a mission. They feature thick atmospheres with no hard surface and are particularly interesting for exploration, due to the presence of weather and different atmospheric phenomena. Jupiter has several advantages making it suitable for such a mission over the other gas giants in the Solar System: it is closer to Earth and easier to reach; its atmospheric and wind conditions are less aggressive, compared to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; and its atmospheric composition has been studied by the Galileo probe, which facilitates the Flyer design. During the initial stages of the research, the topic of developing a Flyer suitable of sustained flight in the atmospheres of gas giants and Jupiter were met with interest from the research society. This is due to the fact that, besides being an interesting topic, the studies in this field are limited, with very little research publicly available. By determining the thrust and lift requirements for horizontal steady flight as function of the altitude and heat chamber temperature, this work provides the first necessary tool for the preliminary design of the Flyer. The derived equations enable the definition of the Flyer external configuration and its payload, provide important input for the planning of the scientific experiments and mission operations, and allow the determination of the carrier rocket requirements. In this paper, a mathematical model for the determination of possible flight altitudes in the Jovian atmosphere is introduced. The required thrust for steady flight at different altitudes of an idealized ramjet engine is calculated as a function of the temperature in the heat chamber. The maximum possible Flyer mass is derived. The model provides the necessary input for the initial design process. After the initial design, the detailed construction of engines and Flyers can be carried out, which is subject of future work. In the second part of this paper, the atmospheric conditions in the flight area are described, and the boundary conditions for the calculation are defined. In the third part, the calculation method is described. The fourth part includes the conclusion and offers an insight into possible future work. II. Gas Composition and Environment An altitude or flight level on Jupiter can be defined as the elevation above the Jovian Sea Level JSL (the JSL is the isobaric surface of static pressure equal to the Earth’s Mean Sea Level pressure or 1013,25 hPa). Most suitable for aerodynamic flight are the lower part of the stratosphere and the upper part of the troposphere up to 60 km above JSL.
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